REQUIRED READING: Thomas Sowell’s ‘Discrimination and Disparities’ Is The Book About Racism That America Needs. “Sowell’s calm and calculated look at racial disparity in America is a stunning work of brevity and reason.”

Sowell certainly does not suggest that discrimination doesn’t exist, but he does break it down into two essential categories. The first is discrimination that is based on evidence and can be positive, such as “a person of discriminating taste.” The second is discrimination based on animosity towards a group. Importantly, Sowell divides the first form into two groups. The first takes no notice of race; the second takes race into account, but only based on accurate information.

Sowell is essentially rejecting the progressive premise that there is no difference between racism based in hatred and racism based in accepting racist systems and disparate outcomes. As it turns out, attempts to address evidence-based discrimination that seek to eliminate the discrimination itself can have bad outcomes, especially for those who are members of groups with more negative outcomes.

One example of this he gives is that progressives widely see criminal background checks for employment as racist. But in reality, employers that use background checks employ black workers at a higher rate. This is because without the checks blacks with clean records suffer from the fact that they belong to a group with a higher crime rate. Ideally, one could argue that employers shouldn’t take group tendencies into account, but until that happens, background checks are a solution that actually works.

Yes, but that doesn’t keep Democrat voter groups riled up.

Anyway — Sowell’s latest has gone to the top of my reading list.

ALL DEMOCRATS HAVE TO DO IS NOT ACT CRAZY… Unfunny Abortion ‘Comedy’ Tour Coming to a Baby Butchery Near You. “Teen Vogue praises the Vagical Mystery Tour, telling our daughters, ‘Abortion can be funny’.”

YOU KNOW THAT VAN WAS A-ROCKIN’: History Channel Show Finds Aerosmith’s First Tour Van.

TOM KNIGHTON: California Protesters Harass Congressman’s Hispanic Wife for Not Staying on Progressive Plantation.

IF HE WERE A REPUBLICAN THIS WOULD BE A MUCH BIGGER STORY: Democrat drives to friend’s home and reportedly shoots him over political disagreement on Facebook.

JUST ANOTHER NIGHT IN GAZA: More than 150 rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip overnight, and Israel retaliated with deadly airstrikes.

I’m old enough to remember when returning Gaza to the Palestinians would bring peace to the Strip.

HOW POWERFUL IS GOOGLE? Powerful enough to rename your part of town.

HEADLINES FROM… PICK A YEAR, ALMOST ANY YEAR: Get Ready for a Massive Government Spending Spree.

Without a budget agreement in place, agencies spent cautiously through the first two quarters of fiscal 2018 before the omnibus—signed six months late in March—obligated an additional $80 billion for defense and $63 billion for civilian agencies.

Federal agencies, now flush with cash, must obligate that money before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 or lose it to the Treasury Department. Analysts believe the federal market will see a monumental effort among procurement officials to spend as much on contracts as possible.

“If agencies are going to spend the extra money in fiscal 2018, it’s going to have to be at a much higher percentage in the fourth quarter than it has been historically,” David Berteau, president of the Professional Services Council, told Nextgov.

Those record-breaking peacetime deficits aren’t going to spend themselves, you know.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is Russia’s Military Better Than America’s?

On the other hand, Russia’s political leadership usually shows more resolve and consistency on military affairs.

SPENGLER: Pope Francis Is Woefully Wrong about the Death Penalty.

The ancient rabbinic view is close to that of St. John Paul II in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. He argued that the death penalty should be “very rare and practically non-existent.” But there is a great gulf fixed between “very rare and practically non-existent,” and the complete abolition of the death penalty, as Pope Francis now teaches. The abolition of the death penalty in principle would in my view weaken the foundation of all states, and most emphatically that of the best of states. It would do irreparable harm to the legitimacy of modern states, an elusive issue that is set in clear relief by the issue of the death penalty.

Consider an extreme example. The State of Israel has executed just one criminal since its founding in 1948, namely Adolf Eichmann, whose crimes surpass the human capacity to absorb horror and whose life was an affront to God as well as man. Israel now confines in prison Arab terrorists who willfully murdered young children and old people, but has never executed any of them; whether it should have done so may be debated, but the fact is that Eichmann’s crimes are of an entirely different order than that of a mere bus-bomber or child rapist.

For Israel, Eichmann had to be executed as a matter of raison d’etat. The nation-state of the Jewish people cannot fulfill its purpose if it is unable to rid the world of a monster who organized the systematic murder of millions of Jews.

Read the whole thing.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sarah Jeong Is a Boring, Typical Product of the American Academy. “The key features of Jeong’s worldview are an obsession with whiteness and its alleged sins; a commitment to the claim that we live in a rape culture; and a sneering contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking. These are central tenets of academic victimology. From the moment freshmen arrive on a college campus, they are inundated by the message that they are either the bearers of white privilege or its victims. College presidents and the metastasizing diversity bureaucracy teach students to see racism where none exists, preposterously accusing their own institutions of systemic bias. ‘Bias response teams,’ confidential ‘discrimination hotlines,’ and implicit-bias training for faculty and staff roll forth from university coffers in wild abandon.”

Welcome to the academy’s New Normal.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When taxpayers get tired of subsidizing those university coffers, we’ll be told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”

RUN, JOE, RUN! Joe Biden Launches LGBTQ Family Acceptance Campaign Called ‘As You Are.’

WELL, GOOD: U.S. Officials Push New Penalties for Hackers of Electrical Grid.

HMM: Mandatory Sanctions Imposed on Russia After State Dept. Confirms Chemical Weapons Use in UK. “There are a number of carve-outs that we are making under the sanctions that are required by the act. Not everything that is mandatory under the act we will be proceeding with at this time. The carve-outs will include a – we will have a waiver for the provision of foreign assistance to Russia and to the Russian people. Our provision of foreign assistance is a tool of U.S. power and influence, and we’re not going to foreswear that just because we have the obligation to impose some sanctions against Russia. So that is going to be a carve-out under this – under these new sanctions.”

DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T: Twitter Bans Conservative Author For Tweet Supporting Sarah Jeong And Opposing Deplatforming.

Elizabeth Kantor:

They deplatformed me—for a tweet deploring deplatforming. Here’s the full text of my offending tweet, a full-throttle defense of New York Times editorial board hiree Sarah Jeong’s freedom of speech and included a self-deprecating reference to my own race: “@sarahjeong This whitey is cheering you on as you fight off the Twitter mob. Down with deplatforming! Plus, it’s clarifying abt. what kind of paper the NYT wants to be . . .” 5:24 AM – 3 Aug 2018.

Honestly, I thought that was a pretty gracious response to someone who had tweeted out “#CancelWhitePeople” and speculated that people like me are natural cave-dwellers unfit for life on the surface of the planet. But according to Twitter it’s me, not Jeong, who has engaged in “hateful conduct” that violates Twitter’s terms of service: “Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin…”

Twitter’s rules are whatever Twitter wants them to be in the moment.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT: Islamic State fighters numbers increase in Syria.

FORGET IT, JAKE — IT’S BERKELEYTOWN: Antifa Prof Who Bashed Trump Supporter in Head with Bike Lock at Berkeley Given Slap on Wrist.

SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Erdogan’s Ottomania.

Islam—both as a religion and as a foundational civilization—lies at the center of this identity. Some might argue that the new Ottomanism came of age with the rise of political Islam; indeed it is difficult to see precisely where Ottomanism begins and Islamism ends. As far as a new conservative bourgeois class and ascendant pro-Erdoğan journalists and public intellectuals are concerned, at least, appeals to the Ottoman identity are more welcome than those to the Golden Age of Islam.

This Ottoman imaginary represents an unprecedented restructuring of the country since 1922. It embodies a new political legitimacy that plumbs the depths of identity desires in ways apparently not fulfilled by the modernizing Kemalist project. Indeed some conservative intellectuals blame the country’s current identity crisis on the secularizing reforms instituted at the founding of the Republic. And after the 1980 military coup, the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” emerged as an antidote to the growing appeal of socialism and to Kurdish secessionist claims.

The Ottoman past has thus become the foundation upon which to build a future once viewed as so far gone that it was impossible to reinvigorate. But exactly what sort of future worth building is a matter of contention, and the country’s current political struggle reflects a deeper conflict between two competing neo-Ottoman imaginaries. On the one hand, there is the Özal variety, which is cosmopolitan, pro-European, and religiously pluralist, even while it recognizes a special role for Islam in society. By contrast, the increasingly dominant vision of Erdoğan and Davutoğlu is exclusivist, anti-Western, and Islamist in both a political and social sense.

Turks have their choice of arsenic or strychnine.

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Lockheed-Dynetics team and Raytheon locked in battle to build 100-kilowatt laser for US Army.

The effort will culminate in a test of the entire system in 2022 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The Army began its effort to get a more powerful laser onto a vehicle less bulky than a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck in 2016.

Raytheon announced last month that it had won a $10 million contract to develop a laser for the Army’s High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstration program.

Dynetics released a statement Aug. 6, just ahead of the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, revealing it had won, along with its partner Lockheed Martin, the second $10 million development contract to build a laser for the HEL TVD program.

All I want for Christmas is a stealth laser tank — preferably one that hovers.

WHAT DO YOU CALL AN IMPEACHED STATE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE? A GOOD START. This State Is Impeaching Its Entire Supreme Court, Maybe They’re Onto Something.

RENT-SEEKERS GOTTA SEEK RENTS: New York City Council Votes to Cap Uber and Lyft.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has championed the measures, is expected to sign the legislation in the coming weeks.

Council members approved a package of bills after months of protests from taxi drivers and others in favor of them and a campaign by the ride-hailing companies urging customers to oppose the bills.

The firms warned that the cap would lead to reduced service in the outer boroughs and to higher fares at a time when the city’s subway and bus systems are struggling.

“The city’s 12-month pause on new vehicle licenses will threaten one of the few reliable transportation options while doing nothing to fix the subways or ease congestion,” a spokeswoman for Uber, Danielle Filson, said in a statement.

Ms. Filson added, “Uber will do whatever it takes to keep up with growing demand.”

Joseph Okpaku, vice president of public policy for Lyft said, “These sweeping cuts to transportation will bring New Yorkers back to an era of struggling to get a ride, particularly for communities of color and in the outer boroughs.”

De Blasio and the City Council are not unaware of this, but forcing gig drivers out of work and forcing minorities and outer boroughs dwellers to shell out more for less service is a small price to pay to protect their buddies in the taxi business.

GOOD LORD: Man at filthy New Mexico compound was training kids to commit school shootings, prosecutors say.

The father of a missing 4-year-old Georgia boy was training children at a filthy New Mexico compound to commit school shootings, prosecutors alleged in court documents Wednesday. The documents say Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was conducting weapons training with assault rifles at the compound near the Colorado border.

It was at that compound in Amalia where authorities found 11 hungry children living in squalor when they raided it Friday.

Prosecutors Timothy Hasson filed the documents while asking that Wahhaj be held without bail after he was arrested last week with four other adults facing child abuse charges.

Prosecutors did not bring up the school shooting accusation in court Wednesday during an initial appearance by the abuse suspects.

Authorities have also said they discovered remains of a boy at the compound. Medical examiners are working to determine a positive identification.

Plus this tidbit CBS News didn’t bother to report:

Sheriff Hogrefe of the Taos County Sheriff Department said in a statement, “We had learned the occupants were most likely heavily armed and considered extremist of the Muslim belief. We also knew from the layout of the compound they would have an advantage if we didn’t deploy tactfully and quickly.”

Good work by the Taos County Sheriff Department, but I suppose Wahhaj’s true motive will never be known.

JOHN HAWKINS: The Liberal Hate for White People Should Cost Them Big at The Ballot Box. “Why vote for someone who defends people who hate you because of the color of your skin?”

That’s exactly what happened in 2016, but will history repeat in the midterms?

SCRAPPLEFACE: 5 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Special Elections.

What I learned from watching the news is that Democrats win even when they lose and Republicans lose even when they win.

JACK DUNPHY: The Real Reasons for Chicago’s Deadly Crime Wave.